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By Brian X. Chen &Malia WollanTHE NEW YORK TIMES • Sunday May 5, 2013 10:29 AM

When a teenage boy snatched the iPhone out of Rose Cha’s hand at a Bronx bus stop in March, she
reported the theft to her carrier and to the police — just as she had done two other times when she
was the victim of cellphone theft. Again, the police said they could not help her.

Cha’s phone was entered into a new nationwide database for stolen cellphones, which tracks a
phone’s unique identifying number to prevent it from being activated, theoretically discouraging
thefts. But police officials say the database has not helped to stanch the ever-rising number of
phone thefts, in part because many stolen phones end up overseas, out of the database’s reach, and
in part because the identifiers are easily modified.

Some law-enforcement authorities, though, say there is a bigger issue — that carriers and
handset makers have little incentive to fix the problem.

“The carriers are not innocent in this whole game. They are making profit off this,” said Cathy
L. Lanier, chief of police in Washington, D.C., where a record 1,829 cellphones were taken in
robberies last year.

George Gascon, San Francisco’s district attorney, said handset makers such as Apple should be
exploring new technologies that could help prevent theft. In March, he said, he met with an Apple
executive, Michael Foulkes, who handles its government relations, to discuss how the company could
improve its anti-theft technology. But Gascon left the meeting, he said, with no promise that Apple
was working to do so.

He added, “Unlike other types of crimes, this is a crime that could be easily fixed with a
technological solution.”

Apple declined to comment.

In San Francisco last year, nearly half of all robberies involved a cellphone, up from 36
percent the year before; in the Washington area, cellphones were taken in

42 percent of robberies, a record. In New York, theft of iPhones and iPads last year accounted
for 14 percent of all crimes.

Wireless carriers say they have faith in the database, which they created with police
departments across the country. They also say they are taking independent steps to address the
problem. Verizon, for example, says it has its own stolen-phone database, making it impossible for
devices reported as stolen to be reactivated on its network.